Author Archives: adkat

Empathy Swarm meets Sophia and Pepper – almost. We are looking forward to discuss how our non-anthropomorphic robot swarm can produce a feeling of Empathy with some humanoid robots in the audience at the festival Meta Marathon 2019 – Robotics.

42 hours non-stop living and working with robots, coexisting and cooperating, celebrating and drinking, loving and laughing: The META Marathon 2019 from March 15-17, 2019 is dedicated to the topic of robotics and transforms the NRW-Forum into a real laboratory for a whole weekend.

From learning the basics of programming Arduino and soldering distance sensors, servo motors and RGB-Leds to the micro-controller to developing a kinematic system that can react to the sensor input and is actuated by the motors. – It was a very busy week for the INDA design and architecture students – With a beautiful outcome and the good feeling that some more students are now enabled to become makers and not consumers of technology!

Emotional swarm robots of Empathy Swarm interact with the guests of Zagreb’s Museum of Contemporary Art and proof that Machines are not alone.

The robots and us experienced exciting days: from the robot’s first contact to strangers at the opening on Tuesday to a vivid discussion on ‘Autonomous relations: actions, reactions & tangled sovereign systems’ with artists Luiz Zanotello and Ralf Becker on Thursday and our final goodbye to the robots on Friday, who will now stay till 3. February 2019 all by themselves. Crazy to see the little ones grow up and become independent 🙂

We also want to thank KONTEJNER again for their hospitality and precious help setting up! We always feel very welcome in Zagreb and like part of the big Kontejner famiiy! ♥

We are looking forward to the first weeks of January and our 9-day DEX -Design EXperimentation – workshop with students from Chulalongkorn University. Under the title “Technology sublime – Preventative medicine for a dystopian future.” architectural students learn about the basics of sensors and electronics to create a kind of activated architecture or a little companion that reacts to environmental stimuli from light to CO2 levels, while thinking about the larger picture and a scenario of how sensed data and a creative mechanism can help the world.

As a warm-up for the Device Art festival of Kontejner in Zagreb, we took 3 of our psychophysics machines on a road trip to Split. The two Megatautophones joined Dr. Doppler and us for a nice performance at MKC Split – Multimedijalni kulturni centar . After the performance in a short talk, moderated by Klara Petrović from Kontejner, we introduced our Empahty Swarm and invited everybody to the opening at the Musuem of Contemporary Art – MSU Zagreb on 18th of December.

These robots by artists Katrin Hochschuh and Adam Donovan are the most endearing work in the small exhibition at Impakt, center for media culture in Utrecht. The Empathy Swarm consists of a group of small robots on wheels. They form formations, draw towards each other, tapping gently against your shoe. It seems like they want to make contact. Or are those feelings of affection no more than human projection?
[...] It is striking that the Empathy Swarm shows how little is needed to generate empathy for an inanimate object. It raises the question why people sometimes have such bad care for their natural environment.

An intense week setting up Empathy Swarm for the very first time, with a great outcome 🙂

The swarm is keeping the memories of what it means to be human and its interpretation of human feelings and social behaviours, alive in – A world without us.

After a fantastic opening on Friday, we joined a panel discussion on Saturday with the other EMAP/EMARE artists Taavi Suisalu, Anna Dumitriu and Alex May, discussing how our works take part in a future scenario that we try to avoid.

We just wanted to share some more impressions of the scale of this state of the project: 10 robots – that’s a lot of parts!!! And even some of the SMD parts are still in boxes as they would just get lost with a size of half a millimeter x a millimeter!!

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

The work is coproduced at Kontejner within the framework of EMAP / EMARE and co-funded by Creative Europe.

With the dear help of professor Zorislav Šojat from Ruđer Bošković Institute, Zagreb, we finally managed to make the robots smooth and silent. 🙂

Learning about interrupt functions to get the update rates of the WiFi communication and the sending of PWM values to the brushless DC motors independent of each other!

See Robertina and Kryten rolling smoothly on the grey “NASA” floor of the studio, while the prototyping of the next generation is in full work mode
– 10 robots to be seen soon, with new body and battery management!

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

The work is coproduced at Kontejner within the framework of EMAP / EMARE and co-funded by Creative Europe.